Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to start generating new traffic is publish content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase of this process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In this section, we will discuss the configuration stage of the traffic automation process. We explain how a WordPress site should be configured to automatically drive new traffic simply by publishing new content to your website.
WordPress Traffic System – Configuration
Being able to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most business owners as one of their greatest challenges online. Also, the business landscape is becoming increasingly more competitive on a global scale and businesses are exploring any advantage available to increase their competitiveness online.
Having the ability to generate traffic on demand can provide website owners with a huge competitive advantage. For businesses, having an expertly configured website gives WordPress users a flying start as soon as their site is launched.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a site that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to take advantage of everything WordPress can offer.
Here’s a simple way to explain the differences:
An expertly configured WordPress site gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured website gives you a professional web presence with an automated online business marketing process!)
Not only does it take more work to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a little story.
Knowing Where To Tap
Everything was going fine in the widget workshop when things ground to a sudden halt.
No one could figure out what happened and so the plant manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
The expert arrived soon afterwards and, without saying a word, walked immediately towards the main control box. After staring at the board for what seemed like 5 minutes, the expert then produced a tiny little hammer from his tool belt and made a gentle tap near the bottom-left side of the unit.
Immediately, the assembly line came back to life.
The plant manager was greatly overjoyed as he thanked the expert, who left as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days later, the factory manager received a bill for $5,000.
The factory manager dialed the expert, demanding to know why the expert had charged them such a large amount of money for so little time delivering such a minimal amount of work. He then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is being able to consistently drive new visitors to their sites.
How much money did the plant stand to lose when production ground to a halt and no one on the factory floor was able to fix it? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for spending years building up the knowledge, skills and expertise that enabled him to immediately assess and avert a crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a blog set up and configured so all you ever had to do is publish content to it and search engines, social followers from Facebook and Twitter and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much time and money would you save if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your website?)
Although the solution to many challenges often seems ridiculously simple once implemented, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site requires more than installing a website and configuring some of the site settings for a client. It also involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs you need to install for certain things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts need to be set up and activated to achieve specific outcomes
- Which options you need to configure in order to ensure that processes will run as expected, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires knowledge and expertise)
Although this part of the WordPress traffic automation system may not seem so technically challenging, it can be quite complicated. The reason why is because it’s not just about installing a solution, tweaking some settings in your admin area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a process that involves your web hosting server, your web site, and various third-party sites and online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic diagram of the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a look at what’s involved.
Configuring Your Web Server
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is fine-tuning settings and options in your web server specifically for handling all web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your web-hosting account settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is beneficial traffic. Some of the web traffic you will attract will be unwelcome traffic like bot spam, security threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This area of the configuration process, therefore, is about evaluating your needs, planning for both bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like implementing spam protection and preventing security threats, to configuring domain and email redirections, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your hosting control panel settings for handling things like emails, page errors, etc?)
After checking your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up a number of external sites.
Configuring External Services
The idea behind choosing external sites is that all of your content will be published to a central location (your site) and from there, it will radiate outwards automatically to other components of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external sites to your system, content pointing back to your website will get automatically posted to search, social and aggregator sites. Your business will then receive increased exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some of the sites and services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your WordPress site to help speed up the configuration process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress site’s settings:
Google Webmaster Tools
(Google Webmaster Tools – create a Google-friendly site)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, SEO tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
After setting up your account with Google, use the details to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your site’s results, SEO, user engagement, marketing campaigns, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, organic referrals, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account is set up, traffic tracking code can be added to all web pages in WordPress using plugins and instantly sent to many other useful applications.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmasters. After setting up your account and entering site details, this information can be used to automate traffic settings and notifications in WordPress using plugins like Yoast SEO (see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress option if you plan to grow a professional online presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which various WordPress plugins can access. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate these features into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this series.
Social Media And Social Bookmarking
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and social bookmarking accounts and get new visitors to your site.
You should set up profiles with all of the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can set up accounts with and post your content to. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just pick the ones that will work with your system and/or content syndication tools (we will cover some of these tools in more detail during the Automation phase).
(There are lots of social bookmarking sites you can post your content to. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Solutions, Content Aggregators, Etc.
There are many emerging web platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary-level sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add your WordPress site feed …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content displays in a Pinterest-like format and users can follow your RebelMouse social feed.
There are many different solutions you can add to your own web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you would like to explore some of these further and discuss a configuration strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party sites, it’s time to configure your WordPress site’s settings.
WordPress – Configuring Your Website Or Blog For Traffic
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that its global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some of the important points.
Global WordPress Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to modify your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings section)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can affect your site’s SEO, search results, etc …
(WordPress Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains an important and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As stated in this section,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have intentionally chosen to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services section
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, only one service is listed …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(Notify dozens of update services automatically with WordPress!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading
This section affects how visitors will see your content when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full text vs a summary of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and blog post digests, and could play a part in someone’s decision to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your site to read the rest of the content from summaries, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the main setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to ping all the update services you have listed whenever new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search engines from visiting your site, make sure this box is left unchecked …
(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although this section is mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your articles, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Permalinks allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(Settings Menu – Permalinks)
The examples below show some of the ways your search-friendly URLS can be configured …
(Configuring permalinks)
For a detailed tutorial on setting up permalinks, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO With SEO-Friendly URLs
WordPress Traffic Generation Plugin Settings – Configuration
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that help to add just about every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Blog Defender WordPress Security Plugin
Once again, it’s important to configure your WordPress site for handling both good traffic and bad traffic. Regardless of the kind of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your web sites is something you cannot ignore.
(WordPress Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your website invisible to hackers and bots.
Go here to learn more:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your site more search engine friendly …
(WP SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO to improve your SEO. Properly configured, this plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to find, classify and index, it also gives you control over how your content is displayed to Google’s search results and social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
WordPress Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with their social networks can help drive more traffic to your site, especially if you provide content that adds value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your website easily using WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing buttons to their site using free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social plugins let you select which social sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some social plugins even allow you to set up protected content areas on your site which users can unlock by liking your page.
Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the layout and design of your site, many themes also provide built-in features that let you improve search optimization and site navigation structure for faster indexing, easily add tracking code, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes come with built-in traffic optimization features)
With many quality themes, adding social sharing features to your website is as easy as selecting the option to enable this functions …
(Many WordPress themes provide users with built-in social sharing features that can be easily enabled on with the click of a button)
WordPress Traffic Automation – Additional Configuration Areas
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
This includes the following:
Website Compliance Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for a growth in visitor numbers, it’s important to plan not only for how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the situations that can cause serious damage to your business as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your website stays compliant with all government regulations.
(Is Your Site Compliant?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Tags & Post Categories
WordPress post categories & tags help to improve your site’s SEO, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress post categories help search engines index your website, which helps to increase traffic.)
As we recommend in this article, your site’s tags and categories should be set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Process.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories that have been set up.
Add A WordPress Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s pages and posts is not only a useful navigation tool for users, it can also help external sites discover more of your site’s content …
(Site Map – great for visitors and beneficial for web traffic too!)
Note: An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same thing. Although Google will index your site just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your WordPress 404 Page Not Found
When visitors searching online for your site type in the wrong web address or click on a link pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they are presented with an error – page not found message (known as a 404 page) …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found error page)
Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 page can be set up in your web server, there are WordPress plugins that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to automatically drive more web traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate , requiring the configuration and integration of various elements and external web properties …
(Traffic System – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The skills and knowledge required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take some web professionals months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate as much of the process as can be automated. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Three
To continue reading, click here:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series designed to help small business owners learn how to grow their business with a WordPress website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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